1 00:00:00,090 --> 00:00:04,590 Welcome everybody to this year's Tarkovsky Memorial Lecture, 2 00:00:04,590 --> 00:00:12,750 which commemorates probably the most distinguished Polish scholar in the 800 year history of this university. 3 00:00:12,750 --> 00:00:23,670 We're delighted this year to have Professor Matthew Shaw of Yale University and the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. 4 00:00:23,670 --> 00:00:31,410 Marcy Shaw is a really interesting combination of historian of Central and Eastern Europe. 5 00:00:31,410 --> 00:00:36,990 Historian of ideas and a very notable writer. 6 00:00:36,990 --> 00:00:45,000 A combination which I think is very well fitted to commemorating Schakowsky, who who had all those components. 7 00:00:45,000 --> 00:00:53,820 And perhaps her best-known book is caveated Ashes of Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism nineteen eighteen to nineteen sixty eight, 8 00:00:53,820 --> 00:01:03,570 in which, of course, the Chekhov's key figures, notably a very remarkable piece of intellectual and political history. 9 00:01:03,570 --> 00:01:15,900 She's also the author of two books, which is a mixture of sort of history of the present memoir Literary Exploration, The Taste of Ashes, 10 00:01:15,900 --> 00:01:26,460 The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, and most recently, The Ukrainian Night An Intimate History of Revolution. 11 00:01:26,460 --> 00:01:37,020 And she has her current research project is rather vividly entitled Phenomenological Encounters Scenes from Central Europe. 12 00:01:37,020 --> 00:01:50,330 So please join me in welcoming Marty short of this year's teleconference. 13 00:01:50,330 --> 00:01:54,690 You. Oh, that's right. 14 00:01:54,690 --> 00:02:03,720 Oh, well, thank you all for coming, especially since it's Friday night, and there must be more exciting social events going on at Oxford. 15 00:02:03,720 --> 00:02:07,320 Thank you very much for joining us, for inviting me. 16 00:02:07,320 --> 00:02:22,770 Thank you to Hubert Chayefsky, who just successfully defended his dissertation for creating a good reason to come to Oxford if we can all look at. 17 00:02:22,770 --> 00:02:27,420 You know, and and I'd like to think of, of course, the person. 18 00:02:27,420 --> 00:02:33,660 Why are we who for whom we are here and the reason why we are here, who is not here with us, but hopefully will be here in spirit, 19 00:02:33,660 --> 00:02:39,150 which is a critical skill and it's a great honour for me to be giving a lecture in 20 00:02:39,150 --> 00:02:45,210 honour of one of my favourite thinkers and somebody who I never met in person. 21 00:02:45,210 --> 00:02:50,650 Louder. OK, so I'm kind of losing my voice, but I'm going to try to talk a little bit louder. 22 00:02:50,650 --> 00:02:57,250 Someone who I never met in person, but whose writing was with me throughout all the years, 23 00:02:57,250 --> 00:03:04,720 I was learning about Eastern Europe and whose writing continues to be with me and from whom I continue to learn I'm cold. 24 00:03:04,720 --> 00:03:08,620 Husky was a thinker who, as you dutifully wrote about, 25 00:03:08,620 --> 00:03:15,070 was constantly in dialogue with not only his contemporaries and his friends and colleagues and opponents, 26 00:03:15,070 --> 00:03:21,610 but also with the dead and thinkers who were no longer alive, who were very much present in his thoughts. 27 00:03:21,610 --> 00:03:30,160 And I like to think of Kokoschka as somebody with whom I am constantly in dialogue, even though he is not here now. 28 00:03:30,160 --> 00:03:39,220 So I'm going to I'm going to tell a story today and the historian so I'm more of a historian and a storyteller than a philosopher. 29 00:03:39,220 --> 00:03:46,150 But I'm going to try to tell a story or rather a series of intersecting stories about Central European philosophy. 30 00:03:46,150 --> 00:03:50,350 And hopefully, by the time I'm done in forty five minutes or so, 31 00:03:50,350 --> 00:03:57,580 you'll have some sense of why all of these stories are relevant or why we're bothering to talk about them today at all. 32 00:03:57,580 --> 00:04:03,640 Or am I just deluding myself into thinking that this makes any sense? 33 00:04:03,640 --> 00:04:14,170 So because it's the 30th anniversary of 1989 this year, I want to start by going back to 1989 and not to Poland, 34 00:04:14,170 --> 00:04:26,770 but to Prague, to once this last square and to the slogan the truth prevails or the truth will prevail. 35 00:04:26,770 --> 00:04:40,030 And this was not a coincidental or thoughtless slogan when it came up at the time of the so-called Velvet Revolution in 1989, Pravda VTC. 36 00:04:40,030 --> 00:04:48,220 The truth prevails or proved it, sweetie, as the truth will prevail depending on whether you use the perfective or the perfective picked 37 00:04:48,220 --> 00:04:56,960 up on a theme and a motif that had for a very long time been central in Czech philosophy. 38 00:04:56,960 --> 00:05:03,570 And of course, many of you are familiar with Vaclav hovels imperative to live in truth. 39 00:05:03,570 --> 00:05:14,290 But the most important thing is to live in truth. And as it turned out, that I, as a young person who was very captivated by the Velvet Revolution, 40 00:05:14,290 --> 00:05:23,770 by the playwright who was in prison and gets to go live in the beautiful castle and by the slogan The Truth Will Prevail, which seemed very romantic. 41 00:05:23,770 --> 00:05:33,400 It turned out that that truth Pravda was the first word I ever learnt in check and check with the first Slavic language I learnt. 42 00:05:33,400 --> 00:05:39,070 And it's not a coincidence that Pravda was the first word that I learnt in Czech because I 43 00:05:39,070 --> 00:05:44,530 was as a young student who was interested in the political philosophy of the dissidents. 44 00:05:44,530 --> 00:05:50,140 They talked about Pravda as as if it were like a pen, 45 00:05:50,140 --> 00:05:59,920 like something you could kind of hold and keep and put in your pocket is something that had some kind of real, palpable, tangible quality to it. 46 00:05:59,920 --> 00:06:05,470 And in polish, I would I would say no, numbnuts. Almost it had this like it had this tangibility. 47 00:06:05,470 --> 00:06:12,500 And it struck me because that's not the way I ever thought about truth in English. 48 00:06:12,500 --> 00:06:16,630 Now, in fact, I had never heard anyone in English talk about truth. 49 00:06:16,630 --> 00:06:21,220 The way the Czech and Slovak dissidents I was meeting then talked about truth. 50 00:06:21,220 --> 00:06:27,650 This idea that it was something real, it was something solid, something tangible. 51 00:06:27,650 --> 00:06:29,120 And now, 30 years later, 52 00:06:29,120 --> 00:06:37,190 looking back at one of the reasons they were pitching the lecture this way is because we're now kind of at a moment of post-truth. 53 00:06:37,190 --> 00:06:45,080 And I want to return to this question of truth. What makes truth, what it is and how do we get to it? 54 00:06:45,080 --> 00:06:52,910 And why do I think they have something interesting to say about this in east central Europe? 55 00:06:52,910 --> 00:07:00,290 So in order to deal with the problem of truth, this epistemological question question about knowledge, 56 00:07:00,290 --> 00:07:11,540 we have to deal with this problem of the relationship between the self in the world, inner and outer consciousness and being subject and object. 57 00:07:11,540 --> 00:07:21,320 This is what we call the epistemological question How do you get from inner to outer, from consciousness to being? 58 00:07:21,320 --> 00:07:25,820 Um, and in in February 1990, 59 00:07:25,820 --> 00:07:35,510 when he came to the United States to give his first speech as the first post-communist president of post-communist Czechoslovakia, 60 00:07:35,510 --> 00:07:47,330 Vaclav Havel stood before a joint meeting of the American Congress and said consciousness precedes being and not the other way around. 61 00:07:47,330 --> 00:07:53,630 As the Marx's claim now, for anyone who's been following the dialogues within the American Congress. 62 00:07:53,630 --> 00:08:03,980 This was obviously like a level of conversation, probably then and especially now completely unknown to our congressmen, 63 00:08:03,980 --> 00:08:08,860 and I don't think anybody knew what it meant, but it sounded very beautiful anyway. 64 00:08:08,860 --> 00:08:09,680 Oh, 65 00:08:09,680 --> 00:08:23,340 it's doubtful that anybody there remember that passage in German ideology when Marx and Engel talk about the fact that being precedes consciousness? 66 00:08:23,340 --> 00:08:24,630 For Mark's, of course, 67 00:08:24,630 --> 00:08:35,700 being perceived consciousness because consciousness is simply derivative of your objective position in the socio economic structure of things. 68 00:08:35,700 --> 00:08:44,180 And when Hovell said consciousness precedes being, he was making a moral statement about responsibility. 69 00:08:44,180 --> 00:08:53,170 You know, and that our responsibility for how we are thinking about the world and how we are approaching the world. 70 00:08:53,170 --> 00:09:01,740 Cannot simply be written off as mechanically derivative of our objective position with it. 71 00:09:01,740 --> 00:09:07,850 But aside from the fact that this was a comment about responsibility. 72 00:09:07,850 --> 00:09:13,490 I started with this because I want to go back to the problem of consciousness and being which has been a problem, 73 00:09:13,490 --> 00:09:17,090 especially since Nietzsche killed off God. 74 00:09:17,090 --> 00:09:25,700 I know we have Hubert here who I think is is going to try to bring back God, which would be a good thing, perhaps. 75 00:09:25,700 --> 00:09:38,350 But once you don't have God to guarantee the relationship between consciousness and being to guarantee that connexion, you've got a big space to fill. 76 00:09:38,350 --> 00:09:47,050 Hannah Arendt in one of my favourite aunt essays, of which there are many and what is existential philosophy, what is existential philosophy? 77 00:09:47,050 --> 00:09:56,140 She actually blames not Nietzsche, but Conte. She blames Conte for severing that connexion once and for all. 78 00:09:56,140 --> 00:10:05,560 Between being and consciousness that gave man a home in the world and she loves Conte, I think arguably she loves it. 79 00:10:05,560 --> 00:10:14,540 Nevertheless, she sees as Conte's fault that leaves us without a place in the world, without any certainty to hold on to without any kind of bridge. 80 00:10:14,540 --> 00:10:17,050 Because for Conte, of course, like the Dingle and Zeke, 81 00:10:17,050 --> 00:10:22,090 the thing itself was precisely what you couldn't get to being itself is what could never be reached. 82 00:10:22,090 --> 00:10:27,460 And art blames Conte, then, for what she calls a kind of philosophy of melancholy, 83 00:10:27,460 --> 00:10:34,120 the kind of melancholic mood of modern philosophy that alienates man from the world. 84 00:10:34,120 --> 00:10:39,850 Because of this absence of the bridge between consciousness and being and for art, you know, 85 00:10:39,850 --> 00:10:48,610 like in a different way for Marx, like for Kafka, like for Heidegger, alienation was the great problem of modernity. 86 00:10:48,610 --> 00:10:52,810 But this problem of truth, of of how you kind of the problem of the bridge, 87 00:10:52,810 --> 00:11:00,430 of how you get from consciousness to being with arguably how modern philosophy gets started with this epistemological problem. 88 00:11:00,430 --> 00:11:03,670 And I want to put the epistemological problem on our heads because I'm going 89 00:11:03,670 --> 00:11:08,830 to come back in the end to the relationship between epistemology and ethics. 90 00:11:08,830 --> 00:11:20,030 But for now, I want to go back to a friend of mathematics, a friend of too much Master Edmond, who of. 91 00:11:20,030 --> 00:11:25,820 Moshtarak, of course, you know, like like Kabul and like Young, who's for whom he arguably takes it, 92 00:11:25,820 --> 00:11:32,330 you know, was very attached to this idea of the truth prevails. 93 00:11:32,330 --> 00:11:38,060 And he and Hustler all met at this moment in the late 1870s in Leipzig, 94 00:11:38,060 --> 00:11:48,080 when both of them were becoming more and more concerned about the problem of certainty and the problem of reaching epistemological clarity. 95 00:11:48,080 --> 00:11:52,300 And whose role would come to feel more and more? 96 00:11:52,300 --> 00:12:03,400 That he had as he went from his student years to his doctoral student years to his young assistant years to have this feeling of emptiness, 97 00:12:03,400 --> 00:12:09,790 this feeling that this ideal of epistemological clarity and certainty could never be reached. 98 00:12:09,790 --> 00:12:12,760 He wanted to overcome conflict and fatalism. 99 00:12:12,760 --> 00:12:24,070 He couldn't stand this kind of gaping abyss between consciousness, between vigour, between how we think and the thing in itself. 100 00:12:24,070 --> 00:12:32,560 He was obsessed with this phrase that he takes from Descartes and which he calls in German cloud height and height, 101 00:12:32,560 --> 00:12:45,070 clarity and distinctiveness that there has to be a way to solve this problem of the bridge and reach epistemological clarity and distinctiveness. 102 00:12:45,070 --> 00:12:50,080 Know an aunt describes who sort of method for resolving this problem is taking a 103 00:12:50,080 --> 00:12:55,390 kind of detour through the intentionality of consciousness who circles solution, 104 00:12:55,390 --> 00:12:59,620 which I'll sketch out very briefly. I don't personally think it works, or it's much of a solution. 105 00:12:59,620 --> 00:13:05,980 But but he spends his whole life working on it, and he was arguably a much greater genius than I am. 106 00:13:05,980 --> 00:13:12,820 Is that consciousness is not like, like a box? The structure of consciousness is one of intentionality. 107 00:13:12,820 --> 00:13:18,340 Intentionality is not like I intend to do my homework tonight or to go to the movies. 108 00:13:18,340 --> 00:13:26,320 Intentionality is like a magnet with a string. It's kind of reaching out to grab the world. 109 00:13:26,320 --> 00:13:38,050 And who has this idea that we can kind of nudge ourselves from the natural attitude in which we kind of blithely unproblematic, 110 00:13:38,050 --> 00:13:47,560 we go around the world assuming it exist into a kind of higher self reflective state that he calls the phenomenological attitude. 111 00:13:47,560 --> 00:13:50,950 Arrived at by performing the phenomenological reduction, 112 00:13:50,950 --> 00:13:57,250 which means you take that problematic realist idealist question of does the world exist or is it just a projection of my consciousness? 113 00:13:57,250 --> 00:14:03,080 And you put it in brackets? Now the big question is, have you actually ever take away the brackets? 114 00:14:03,080 --> 00:14:11,290 But but for now, we just put it in brackets. You put it in brackets, you put it aside and you concentrate on this exhaustive, 115 00:14:11,290 --> 00:14:18,880 intense description of the object as the intentionality of your consciousness has grabbed it. 116 00:14:18,880 --> 00:14:27,970 And it involves performing an analysis from a first person I that is not exactly the same as the empirical I. 117 00:14:27,970 --> 00:14:34,270 It's kind of an Hegelian out of the eye so that the transcendental ego, 118 00:14:34,270 --> 00:14:46,990 the pure eye is a kind of higher purified state in which everything that is particular empirical, psychic, psychological, physical has been purged. 119 00:14:46,990 --> 00:14:54,550 Now this just articulation of the transcendental ego from the empirical ego seems to me to be insane. 120 00:14:54,550 --> 00:14:58,600 I mean, I think it's something it can be done in theory, but but not in practise. 121 00:14:58,600 --> 00:15:02,060 But he deeply believed it could work and that through this, 122 00:15:02,060 --> 00:15:08,650 the nudging of a higher state and this phenomenological reduction in this analysis performed from the point of view, the transcendental ego. 123 00:15:08,650 --> 00:15:14,590 You could actually reach a epistemological clarity and absolute truth. 124 00:15:14,590 --> 00:15:21,970 And John PyTorch go to I'll talk about in a few minutes, I think describes this much better than who Searle himself does, 125 00:15:21,970 --> 00:15:27,820 whose role, I think was a terrible writer and ironically, for someone who is obsessed with clarity and distinctiveness. 126 00:15:27,820 --> 00:15:36,160 He's basically incapable of writing a single, clear sentence. But the picture, I think, describes it so much more clearly. 127 00:15:36,160 --> 00:15:38,890 And he says that Hoose are all basically OK. 128 00:15:38,890 --> 00:15:45,400 He never reopened to the brackets so that you get to ask the question again of whether the world really exist. 129 00:15:45,400 --> 00:15:53,110 But he tries to sink you to a point where you are so wrapped up in this intensive, exhaustive description of the world, 130 00:15:53,110 --> 00:16:01,330 as it appears to the transcendental ego that you somehow lose the desire to kind of ask that question about whether it really exist. 131 00:16:01,330 --> 00:16:07,000 I mean, Toshka says this objective Corlett remaining after the reduction of coral, 132 00:16:07,000 --> 00:16:13,090 about which it no longer makes sense to ask about its existence or non-existence. 133 00:16:13,090 --> 00:16:21,730 In any case, it seems to me as a historian and a non philosopher, that Khusro basically had this problem that that in Polish, 134 00:16:21,730 --> 00:16:28,360 there's a saying which goes, You can't dance at two weddings at once. 135 00:16:28,360 --> 00:16:31,690 I think it exists in a bunch of other languages, but not English, 136 00:16:31,690 --> 00:16:37,930 whose rule with one with a classic example of somebody who wanted to dance at Two Weddings at once. 137 00:16:37,930 --> 00:16:44,170 He wanted all the depth of subjectivity and all the certainty of objectivity. And he wanted it without giving it anything up. 138 00:16:44,170 --> 00:16:48,550 He had it dancing it to wedding problems. OK. 139 00:16:48,550 --> 00:16:54,820 And then Heidegger comes along, who, of course, was with his real student, and Heidegger is Move, 140 00:16:54,820 --> 00:17:02,230 which I find much easier to understand that whose roles move, you know, whose roles move as a radicalisation of the continent, 141 00:17:02,230 --> 00:17:10,360 which says, OK, if you don't start with the subject and derive the object and you don't start with the object and derive the subject you start with, 142 00:17:10,360 --> 00:17:16,780 the relationship in the beginning is the relationship. The relationship with subject and object in some way perceives the parts. 143 00:17:16,780 --> 00:17:21,370 Intentionality is that bind that cannot be broken. 144 00:17:21,370 --> 00:17:26,590 So you're always in that relationship. We're always connected to the world that way. 145 00:17:26,590 --> 00:17:30,820 The relation precedes the parts, and Heidegger then comes along and says, OK, 146 00:17:30,820 --> 00:17:37,000 this whole question about how can we how can we know that the world exist? 147 00:17:37,000 --> 00:17:47,620 Does it really make any sense? Because who could ask it aside from we ourselves, the kind of beings we are and we are always already in the world? 148 00:17:47,620 --> 00:17:54,040 There's no place outside of the world to which we could step and look at the world 149 00:17:54,040 --> 00:17:58,540 as a subject separate from an object and ask the question of does it exist? 150 00:17:58,540 --> 00:18:04,120 Because we're always already inside? We're embedded. Involved were engaged. 151 00:18:04,120 --> 00:18:08,950 We're concerned. You know, we're we're moving things around. 152 00:18:08,950 --> 00:18:12,670 We're always up to something. There's no there's no Archimedes point. 153 00:18:12,670 --> 00:18:19,840 It's an illusion that there's some Archimedes point from which you could clearly take a subject as articulated from the object, 154 00:18:19,840 --> 00:18:21,550 so that that's the height of Gary and move. 155 00:18:21,550 --> 00:18:30,430 And it also moves away from the transparency of who circles transcendental ego, which is both somehow the deepest, 156 00:18:30,430 --> 00:18:40,360 most important intimate part of us, but also curiously generic universal purged of all personal qualities and absolutely transparent in Heidegger. 157 00:18:40,360 --> 00:18:47,110 Suddenly things start to get hidden. OK, so Heidegger says that we're always already in the world. 158 00:18:47,110 --> 00:18:51,250 There's no outside, there's no escape. There's no Archimedes point. 159 00:18:51,250 --> 00:18:57,230 But most of the time in the world, we're not really living in truth, we're living in authentically. 160 00:18:57,230 --> 00:19:02,680 We've kind of fallen into the world. We're kind of going along with other people and other things. 161 00:19:02,680 --> 00:19:14,140 And above all, we are trying to conceal from ourselves the reality of our existence, which is that we are always already moving towards our own death. 162 00:19:14,140 --> 00:19:21,760 So for Heidegger to live, in truth, you've got to be kind of shaken into what he calls authenticity, 163 00:19:21,760 --> 00:19:29,350 which involves facing the fact that we are always already moving towards our own death with eyes wide open. 164 00:19:29,350 --> 00:19:36,820 Now it's this is extremely unpleasant. It's a state of shakiness that brings us into a state of angst. 165 00:19:36,820 --> 00:19:41,410 Angst is not like fear that takes an object like, I'm afraid of snakes. 166 00:19:41,410 --> 00:19:47,110 You can take with snakes and then it will go away. Almost doesn't have an object. 167 00:19:47,110 --> 00:19:53,180 It's this kind of uneasiness in the face of human finitude. 168 00:19:53,180 --> 00:19:59,060 OK, so this Owen Heimlich height, this uncanny this the fact that we can never get home in the world, 169 00:19:59,060 --> 00:20:03,200 we are always going to feel alienated and we can never feel at home, 170 00:20:03,200 --> 00:20:09,860 not because of this subject object gap, because I think there's really not that much of a gap for Heidegger if there's a gap at all. 171 00:20:09,860 --> 00:20:14,960 But because we're always already moving towards our own death. OK. 172 00:20:14,960 --> 00:20:21,000 So I'm sure you all know the story about Heidegger being who's the all star student who who 173 00:20:21,000 --> 00:20:26,900 Searle recommends as his successor at the University of Freiburg in the late 1920s twenties. 174 00:20:26,900 --> 00:20:31,340 Heidegger gets that position in 1930. The Nazis come to power. 175 00:20:31,340 --> 00:20:39,440 You know, Heidegger joins the Nazi Party. He takes over directorship of the University of Freiburg under his leadership, whose role, 176 00:20:39,440 --> 00:20:46,880 as well as all other professors of non Aryan descent, are expelled from the university and forbidden on this premises. 177 00:20:46,880 --> 00:20:59,690 Now what does Cicero do? Who's the role, it turns out, goes back to his desk and tries harder and harder to clarify the phenomenological reduction, 178 00:20:59,690 --> 00:21:07,340 which is this extremely abstruse philosophical procedure that seems to me can work in theory, but not in practise. 179 00:21:07,340 --> 00:21:11,150 I don't know anyone who's ever purely performed phenomenological reduction. 180 00:21:11,150 --> 00:21:16,910 But I think the most moving testimony of his response are in his letters to his Polish student, 181 00:21:16,910 --> 00:21:24,560 who by the end is a Polish professor, Roman and garden with whom? Who's real sends these letters, saying, I have to. 182 00:21:24,560 --> 00:21:31,550 I just I, I have to clarify, I have to make people see, I have to make people see that yes, 183 00:21:31,550 --> 00:21:37,760 it can be done that yes, there is a path to absolute truth and epistemological clarity. 184 00:21:37,760 --> 00:21:48,820 And if I could just get people to see that, then they would not be attracted to the kind of inner rationalism that has led us to barbarism. 185 00:21:48,820 --> 00:21:54,910 He then comes on the invitation of the unfettered Scot and a few other colleagues to Prague 186 00:21:54,910 --> 00:22:02,080 in nineteen thirty five to give the lectures he can no longer deliver in Nazi Germany. 187 00:22:02,080 --> 00:22:10,150 And there he talks about the fact that enlightenment reason has failed because it's proven to thin, 188 00:22:10,150 --> 00:22:19,120 too superficial that the Enlightenment understood reason and rationality as a leap into the world of objectivity. 189 00:22:19,120 --> 00:22:28,330 It decapitated the thinker, it decapitated the subject and not without a more robust grounding in the subject. 190 00:22:28,330 --> 00:22:34,570 Enlightenment reason is never going to be deep enough to save us. 191 00:22:34,570 --> 00:22:41,560 And that that is precisely the reason why these irrational forces have led us to barbarism. 192 00:22:41,560 --> 00:22:45,070 We need who saw says a deeper reason, a thicker reason. 193 00:22:45,070 --> 00:22:49,840 We need to ground our objectivity and the deepest subjectivity. 194 00:22:49,840 --> 00:22:56,530 And if we could do that, if people could just see that, yes, we can, who through is kind of like the Obama figure, 195 00:22:56,530 --> 00:23:00,340 like, yes, we can get to epistemological clarity and absolute truth. 196 00:23:00,340 --> 00:23:05,560 That would be the thing that would now save us from Nazi isms, Guided later wrote. 197 00:23:05,560 --> 00:23:13,240 He said he absolutely believed that his philosophy would save the world. Now, if you read who Soros philosophy and you know, 198 00:23:13,240 --> 00:23:19,500 you read through the sources on what's happening in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the pathos of this is extraordinary. 199 00:23:19,500 --> 00:23:25,090 You know, who was unable to articulate a single clear sentence is an extremely abstruse procedure. 200 00:23:25,090 --> 00:23:27,970 You know, there's there's all of this heavy philosophical language, 201 00:23:27,970 --> 00:23:32,500 some of which he's kind of invented and reinvented that makes no sense to most people. 202 00:23:32,500 --> 00:23:38,950 And in the meantime, Hitler has taken power. But but he really believes that if you can just see we could get to absolute truth. 203 00:23:38,950 --> 00:23:42,340 People will no longer be attracted to barbarism. 204 00:23:42,340 --> 00:23:52,030 Leftist of the Russian philosopher who did not believe in reason or truth, the same way who Israel did at all, 205 00:23:52,030 --> 00:23:59,110 but who was very close friend of whose rules of rights when whose world dies in nineteen thirty eight. 206 00:23:59,110 --> 00:24:06,610 This very beautiful kind of eulogy to him in which. 207 00:24:06,610 --> 00:24:13,780 DAV writes that for Hoosiers, it was always a kind of Kirkegaard, an either or situation, either. 208 00:24:13,780 --> 00:24:19,210 Yes, we can. We can get to absolute truth and epistemological clarity. 209 00:24:19,210 --> 00:24:24,700 Or it's the madhouse or we resign ourselves to the loony bin. 210 00:24:24,700 --> 00:24:32,680 There's nothing in between. And so it's a kind of pascaline wager in that sense, like, you've got it, you've got to stick yourself on truth. 211 00:24:32,680 --> 00:24:38,850 You have to believe that it can be done because the the alternative is horrific. 212 00:24:38,850 --> 00:24:44,600 And I think it's just I've articulated this much more beautifully than whose real himself ever articulated this. 213 00:24:44,600 --> 00:24:47,380 I mean, it's just all this, just a much more literary writer. 214 00:24:47,380 --> 00:24:55,750 He also translates as a kind of footnote what customer calls evidence in German, which has no real good English translation. 215 00:24:55,750 --> 00:25:00,620 It gets translated into evidence or self evidence or just evidence. 216 00:25:00,620 --> 00:25:04,510 It doesn't make it. It doesn't really make sense in German. It doesn't make people less sense in English. 217 00:25:04,510 --> 00:25:10,870 He translates it into Russian as you witnessed, it actually makes sense in Russian. 218 00:25:10,870 --> 00:25:19,690 This obviousness like obviousness and like scene to the eyes, which is really what a lot of phenomenology was about. 219 00:25:19,690 --> 00:25:24,010 In any case, OK. So that's that phenomenological tradition. 220 00:25:24,010 --> 00:25:31,120 There was another another route to truth that ah, and also addresses in that same essay what is existential philosophy? 221 00:25:31,120 --> 00:25:41,450 And that one led not for who Searle and Heidegger, but through Hegel. And you see that you see that play out. 222 00:25:41,450 --> 00:25:52,070 I think most movingly in the case of Georg Lucas, who is, of course, becomes a Marxist at a certain point, but maybe more profoundly Hegelian. 223 00:25:52,070 --> 00:25:55,640 And you see that story play out especially beautifully in Mary Glocks. 224 00:25:55,640 --> 00:26:03,860 Book on the young Luke IUCh, in which she writes about how that distance between subject and object was not just an intellectual problem for him. 225 00:26:03,860 --> 00:26:12,430 It was a gap that he suffered over. It was a lack of wholeness that was painful. 226 00:26:12,430 --> 00:26:22,090 And what Hagel then provides is less the idea of tele ology, which is, I think, what we often associate Hagel with and more. 227 00:26:22,090 --> 00:26:28,510 The idea of wholeness of totality thus far is just gone for the truth of the whole. 228 00:26:28,510 --> 00:26:34,690 And for Lucas, it was the seduction of wholeness, the seduction of totality. 229 00:26:34,690 --> 00:26:39,880 That's a thing that was special about Marxism was the point of view of the whole that you 230 00:26:39,880 --> 00:26:47,290 couldn't understand one part in isolation from the others in history and class consciousness, 231 00:26:47,290 --> 00:26:47,950 Lucas writes. 232 00:26:47,950 --> 00:26:56,380 It's not the primacy of economic motives and historical explanation that constitutes a decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought. 233 00:26:56,380 --> 00:27:02,590 But the point of view of totality, the all pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts, 234 00:27:02,590 --> 00:27:10,170 the primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science. 235 00:27:10,170 --> 00:27:13,980 So for a generation and arguably for caucus goers generation, 236 00:27:13,980 --> 00:27:24,930 that truth of of Hegel turned Marxism turned to communism turned Stalinism is in some way realised in confrontation with Nazi ism. 237 00:27:24,930 --> 00:27:34,620 And I think this is especially true in the case of his Czech contemporaries born in the 20s and the Poles always say the betrayal at Yalta. 238 00:27:34,620 --> 00:27:43,610 The Czechs say that betrayal at Munich. And that was when Western democracy sells out Czechoslovakia. 239 00:27:43,610 --> 00:27:49,760 OK. When the Stalinist, you take power. 240 00:27:49,760 --> 00:28:00,650 In Prague. John Kataoka, who was one of whose roles last students, Petrushka went to Freiburg to study with Hu Searle and Heidegger in 1933, 241 00:28:00,650 --> 00:28:09,020 and he was in Freiburg in 1933 as a young Czech student born in 1987 when the Nazis took power. 242 00:28:09,020 --> 00:28:15,910 In nineteen forty eight. Now as a forty one year old professor of philosophy. 243 00:28:15,910 --> 00:28:19,390 The Stalinist take power in Prague. 244 00:28:19,390 --> 00:28:29,380 And interestingly, coach responds exactly the way, exactly the way that Cyril had responded in nineteen thirty three. 245 00:28:29,380 --> 00:28:39,790 In fact, he even has the same desk is when Masaryk left Leipzig in 1877. 246 00:28:39,790 --> 00:28:48,460 He left who through all his idea, it was more like a podium, something like this, like kind of standing desk. 247 00:28:48,460 --> 00:29:01,870 And in the nineteen thirties, shortly before his death, whose role gave master access to the coach of the Stalinist take power in Prague. 248 00:29:01,870 --> 00:29:11,980 In nineteen forty eight for Tortuga Retreats, to his study, to his desk, and he reread some marks and he reread Hegel, 249 00:29:11,980 --> 00:29:21,250 and he makes these notes in his diary, which I found very moving when I read this, and he said but but it was a misunderstanding. 250 00:29:21,250 --> 00:29:25,000 Marx misunderstands the problem of alienation. 251 00:29:25,000 --> 00:29:31,000 In fact, he presents the problem of alienation in such a way that in fact conceals that problem entirely. 252 00:29:31,000 --> 00:29:38,360 He's imagining that alienation. This is what PyTorch, because writing to himself is something like a kind of illness, 253 00:29:38,360 --> 00:29:47,470 something that can be cured through some kind of technical means that it's possible to live without alienation, 254 00:29:47,470 --> 00:29:53,740 that that alienation is middle class loss to middle class nanos, which can't really be translated. 255 00:29:53,740 --> 00:30:03,250 But it's that it's an imperfection in the sense of something not yet having been perfected like an imperfect verb in the Slavic languages. 256 00:30:03,250 --> 00:30:09,400 You know, that alienation is an imperfection that still could yet be perfected, and Petrushka said, 257 00:30:09,400 --> 00:30:19,750 but this is this is a misunderstanding because alienation, the fact that we live in alienation is not a lack of completeness. 258 00:30:19,750 --> 00:30:25,690 It's not an imperfection that can be cured. It's the fact that we are not ourselves. 259 00:30:25,690 --> 00:30:28,580 That man is not himself. 260 00:30:28,580 --> 00:30:38,390 Alienation, but excavates the fact that man is not at home in the world, that that hurt, that wound that Marx wants to heal is irrevocable. 261 00:30:38,390 --> 00:30:42,550 It cannot be healed. Alienation can never be healed. 262 00:30:42,550 --> 00:30:51,250 OK, I'm going to jump ahead now just a little bit to the end of the spell in this period and we'll skip Stalinist terror Friday evening, 263 00:30:51,250 --> 00:30:58,090 you probably don't want too much Stalinist terror. Stalin dies in nineteen fifty three. 264 00:30:58,090 --> 00:31:06,820 Khrushchev gives his famous secret speech in 1956 for the Czech and the Slovak writers, especially more so than the Poles. 265 00:31:06,820 --> 00:31:15,850 It's a shock, and they literally have no other language apart from Stalinist language at that time with which to critique Stalinism. 266 00:31:15,850 --> 00:31:22,060 And initially, when they have to kind of get together and talk after Khrushchev's secret speech, 267 00:31:22,060 --> 00:31:27,400 they say things like, Listen, my generation, we grew up with Stalin's name and my best friends. 268 00:31:27,400 --> 00:31:31,240 They went to their death in the Nazi camps with Stalin's name, on your lip, on their lips. 269 00:31:31,240 --> 00:31:37,170 Well, now you're telling me. Well, no, I'm not going to apologise. I'm not ashamed. 270 00:31:37,170 --> 00:31:42,810 And how they eventually start to step back is through a confrontation of the 271 00:31:42,810 --> 00:31:49,230 phenomenological turned existentialist tradition with the Hegelian Marxist tradition. 272 00:31:49,230 --> 00:31:54,420 And you go back to these questions, where is truth? Is it in the subject or is it in the object? 273 00:31:54,420 --> 00:31:58,830 Is it in consciousness or is it in the world? 274 00:31:58,830 --> 00:32:10,950 We go back to High Tiger's idea about authenticity and alienation and choice, and the idea of taking hold of ourselves and seeing if we can live. 275 00:32:10,950 --> 00:32:15,180 In truth, Heidegger really like this word gives orphan height. 276 00:32:15,180 --> 00:32:20,140 We're kind of thrown into the world our thrown ness for software. 277 00:32:20,140 --> 00:32:25,410 What was really important about give orphan height was that we're thrown into the world and we are abandoned. 278 00:32:25,410 --> 00:32:34,380 We're abandoned by God because God does not exist. Therefore, we carry this unbearable responsibility because in the absence of God, 279 00:32:34,380 --> 00:32:40,710 there is no one else to create values or take responsibility for our choices outside of ourselves. 280 00:32:40,710 --> 00:32:46,950 And supporters move was to say like, Yes, you know, Dostoyevsky was right. 281 00:32:46,950 --> 00:32:50,940 If God is dead, then everything is permitted. Nietzsche was right. 282 00:32:50,940 --> 00:32:55,200 God is dead. The consequences must be interpreted as radically as possible. 283 00:32:55,200 --> 00:33:05,280 If any compensation is to be made for the loss and this confrontation of the Marx's to and tradition with all its historical determinism in totality. 284 00:33:05,280 --> 00:33:12,630 And now this could phenomenological turn existentialist tradition with its concern with the relationship between 285 00:33:12,630 --> 00:33:19,890 being and consciousness and choice is going to lead to a discussion about responsibility and determinism. 286 00:33:19,890 --> 00:33:24,360 And so the big question and this is really where called Kosky becomes one of the most 287 00:33:24,360 --> 00:33:29,460 important voices still is a very young man in Poland is about responsibility and history. 288 00:33:29,460 --> 00:33:37,140 And where is the border between historical determinism and individual agency? 289 00:33:37,140 --> 00:33:43,230 And he will be one of the first and most articulate people in the 1950s to insist that moral 290 00:33:43,230 --> 00:33:50,190 decisions for the individual remain despite any kind of historical determinism we may believe in. 291 00:33:50,190 --> 00:33:59,430 That determinism does not absolve one of individual responsibility and his contemporary Carl Kosik. 292 00:33:59,430 --> 00:34:09,120 We'll go back to trying to work out this relationship between the individual and history and say it's like it's basically like, Heidegger says. 293 00:34:09,120 --> 00:34:16,530 We're always already thrown into the world. We're always already thrown into history, so we're not creating it ex nihilo. 294 00:34:16,530 --> 00:34:20,130 You know, there's something already there that we're interacting with, 295 00:34:20,130 --> 00:34:24,690 but we're also not passive objects that can be somehow disarticulated from history. 296 00:34:24,690 --> 00:34:33,350 We're always already involved. We're involved, and therefore we're responsible because we are part of history. 297 00:34:33,350 --> 00:34:39,890 And he then Kosik in 1967 tells the story of a certain religious reformer, a parable. 298 00:34:39,890 --> 00:34:45,710 This is obviously the 15th century religious reformer young who saw the acoustic doesn't mention his name, 299 00:34:45,710 --> 00:34:51,740 who is advised by a theologian while in prison that when the ecclesiastical council comes to him, 300 00:34:51,740 --> 00:34:57,220 if the ecclesiastical council says you have only one eye. 301 00:34:57,220 --> 00:35:02,050 He is obliged to acknowledge that the council is correct. 302 00:35:02,050 --> 00:35:14,780 And the imprisoned man replied he knew by his own reason that he had two eyes and a denial of reason was a betrayal of conscience. 303 00:35:14,780 --> 00:35:21,230 The loss of a unity of reason and conscious conscience leads then to nihilism. 304 00:35:21,230 --> 00:35:28,490 So he's also he's going back, he's he's going back to who's the rules idea as well of reasoned truth and clarity. 305 00:35:28,490 --> 00:35:34,790 And a denial of that reason is a moral problem. It's not merely in the system, a logical problem. 306 00:35:34,790 --> 00:35:39,470 So what Kozak and Colaco ski share here is this kind of affirmation without abandoning 307 00:35:39,470 --> 00:35:45,680 historical determinism and affirmation both of the reality of historical determinism, 308 00:35:45,680 --> 00:35:53,060 but also responsibility of the individual as part of that movement of history, because we are participants in history. 309 00:35:53,060 --> 00:36:00,330 We're embedded in history. So it's a kind of interactive model, so to speak. 310 00:36:00,330 --> 00:36:02,580 Now, after nineteen sixty eight, 311 00:36:02,580 --> 00:36:13,170 after the anti-Zionist campaign in Poland and then subsequently the Prague Spring that was basically in in Eastern Europe, 312 00:36:13,170 --> 00:36:20,100 the end of Marxism, communism goes on for another couple of decades, as you well know. 313 00:36:20,100 --> 00:36:30,430 But Marxism as a kind of as a vibrant intellectual choice and force, that's the beginning of the end. 314 00:36:30,430 --> 00:36:36,190 The truth of Marxism, of course, depended upon this our comedian perspective prevented. 315 00:36:36,190 --> 00:36:44,830 Provided by the end of history. Available as Hagel's sense, once the owl of Minerva takes flight only with the coming of the dusk, 316 00:36:44,830 --> 00:36:49,090 meaning is only retrospective marks was very forward thinking. 317 00:36:49,090 --> 00:36:53,410 But actually for Hegel, it was less about thinking forwards and more about thinking backwards. 318 00:36:53,410 --> 00:36:59,200 Meaning can only be seen in retrospect. Right, by the way, takes up this Hegelian position, she says. 319 00:36:59,200 --> 00:37:04,030 The author is never that the actor is never the author of his or her own life story. 320 00:37:04,030 --> 00:37:09,520 It's only the historian looking back who can see what it was all about because the consequences 321 00:37:09,520 --> 00:37:17,020 of actions are infinite because of what she calls the boundless ness of human interrelatedness. 322 00:37:17,020 --> 00:37:24,370 So to act is to set something in motion, the consequences of which can never be foreseen and could only even be glimpsed in retrospect, 323 00:37:24,370 --> 00:37:36,760 but never looking forwards, only looking backwards. I want to now turn to two another thinker and a student of both caucuses and Tortugas, 324 00:37:36,760 --> 00:37:46,570 whose Christophe Behal is a much younger generation born in 1948 and in very sadly died too young. 325 00:37:46,570 --> 00:37:49,390 He was a student of Kerlikowske, is at Work State University. 326 00:37:49,390 --> 00:37:56,850 In 1968, after Kerlikowske emigrated from Poland following the events of the anti-Zionist campaign, 327 00:37:56,850 --> 00:38:04,420 a mutual friend of Kerlikowske Izinyon Tortugas sends just off me hellscape to Prague to 328 00:38:04,420 --> 00:38:10,720 unfettered sugar to write his dissertation on Heidegger under the supervision of Yann Petrushka, 329 00:38:10,720 --> 00:38:20,910 which happens largely through correspondence. And Mikulski's question is coming out of of Marxism and coming out of a Galleon ism. 330 00:38:20,910 --> 00:38:30,090 Can there be truth and meaning only in wholeness? Does the understanding of something presuppose finding some kind of unity? 331 00:38:30,090 --> 00:38:36,950 Is it only from the perspective of the whole that we can understand our world? 332 00:38:36,950 --> 00:38:46,100 And when when the Yankees just offered me half ski rights to Yampa, Texaco, who is 40 years older. 333 00:38:46,100 --> 00:38:52,670 Petrushka responds with comments about the special meaning of Heidegger, its philosophy. 334 00:38:52,670 --> 00:39:02,450 For our part of Europe, for our Eastern Europe and what brings the older philosopher and the younger philosopher together at that moment? 335 00:39:02,450 --> 00:39:09,050 And this is now the nineteen seventies is a shared understanding that Heidegger, in the tradition he represents, 336 00:39:09,050 --> 00:39:17,960 could be an antidote to what Louis Walsh calls the Hegelian bite that perhaps the way out of Hegel is precisely through Heidegger. 337 00:39:17,960 --> 00:39:25,880 And for me, Huskey Heidegger became the thinker who provided a point of departure for answering the questions that kept him awake at night. 338 00:39:25,880 --> 00:39:33,860 Yes, there could be meaning without totality, without an Archimedes point outside of history and outside of oneself, 339 00:39:33,860 --> 00:39:40,940 because Heidegger, like Hegel, was a profoundly historical thinker for whom meaning was only possible in time. 340 00:39:40,940 --> 00:39:43,760 Except that in in High Tiger's philosophy, 341 00:39:43,760 --> 00:39:52,490 you didn't look at history from the outside as something already either completed or potentially to be completed, you looked at it from the inside. 342 00:39:52,490 --> 00:39:58,910 We're always already thrown into the world into history, always already bound up in it, open to it. 343 00:39:58,910 --> 00:40:07,560 In some ways, there's no place apart from the world to look at history from a distance and contemplate it because we're in the world. 344 00:40:07,560 --> 00:40:12,490 You know, Heidegger taught us not in the way a bird was in a cage or a cookie was in a jar. 345 00:40:12,490 --> 00:40:20,300 Not in such a way that we could be taken out of it or extricated, not in such a way that we could, in principle, be detached. 346 00:40:20,300 --> 00:40:31,100 Mikulski later writes that life and history do not go on independently of our participation, like a carousel you can jump off or on at will. 347 00:40:31,100 --> 00:40:37,910 And so that there was no point of view from outside of time and outside of history, 348 00:40:37,910 --> 00:40:43,880 from which we could look at our own condition and relative size it because the time in which we were living had its own finality. 349 00:40:43,880 --> 00:40:46,820 We were the co-creators of Meaning in this time. 350 00:40:46,820 --> 00:40:52,610 All of those meanings were fragile and open to change, but they were nonetheless deep and binding and real. 351 00:40:52,610 --> 00:40:56,870 They were the ones had we had in the ones we had to use. 352 00:40:56,870 --> 00:41:04,910 Meaning was possible, but not outside of ourselves and not above ourselves, because everything around us was, in some ways, also our creation. 353 00:41:04,910 --> 00:41:12,470 We were co-creators of Meaning in History and we were therefore responsible. 354 00:41:12,470 --> 00:41:18,880 And Heidegger, for Mahaskey, was the philosopher of freedom and of freedom as responsibility. 355 00:41:18,880 --> 00:41:27,100 And it was understandable, Michalski wrote, that that we long to this burden ourselves of this responsibility. 356 00:41:27,100 --> 00:41:32,890 And this is something I think arguably he takes very largely not just from Petrushka and Heidegger, but also from Kerlikowske. 357 00:41:32,890 --> 00:41:43,210 This we long to this burden ourselves of this responsibility. We long for the world as a garden, something that's orderly, that secure, that stable. 358 00:41:43,210 --> 00:41:45,580 But there was no such world, 359 00:41:45,580 --> 00:41:53,770 and there is no such guarded for lurking in every moment was the possibility of the end of a border of the closing of the world, 360 00:41:53,770 --> 00:42:02,000 as it is in the beginning of something new for which we will always be co responsible. 361 00:42:02,000 --> 00:42:13,880 OK. One of the things that happened while Michalski and PyTorch in the 1970s were having this correspondence about Heidegger is that Miyazaki, 362 00:42:13,880 --> 00:42:25,910 who had a kind of gift for persuading people to do things. Tried to persuade Petrozza to write down his thoughts about the philosophy of history. 363 00:42:25,910 --> 00:42:34,700 Petrushka eventually does this, writing up some lectures he had given an underground seminars and private apartments. 364 00:42:34,700 --> 00:42:41,720 There later, they circulate in some resort as heretical essays in the philosophy of history. 365 00:42:41,720 --> 00:42:45,530 The third one called Does history have a meaning? 366 00:42:45,530 --> 00:42:54,980 Michalski managed to translate into polish and publish in the Catholic journals knock in crackles before that possibility of publication, 367 00:42:54,980 --> 00:43:00,050 which was shut down. And in that essay, does history have a meaning? 368 00:43:00,050 --> 00:43:05,340 But Hosko argues that history begins when meaning is shaken. 369 00:43:05,340 --> 00:43:14,230 Shaken the way that Heidecker feels, we are shaken when we confront the truth of our condition, which is being towards death. 370 00:43:14,230 --> 00:43:19,300 When meaning is shaken, this shaken, this is a problem. 371 00:43:19,300 --> 00:43:25,570 It's the beginning of Problem Wettest City, it's the beginning of asking questions for plateaued prehistory. 372 00:43:25,570 --> 00:43:30,040 It's before we start asking questions. History begins when we start asking questions. 373 00:43:30,040 --> 00:43:33,880 This asking questions is what philosophy is accepting. 374 00:43:33,880 --> 00:43:41,590 Responsibility is about posing the question of meaning, and the shaking is good, Petrushka says, 375 00:43:41,590 --> 00:43:47,350 because it pushes us to seek meaning, which is riskier but ultimately more meaningful. 376 00:43:47,350 --> 00:43:52,180 The shaking is not impoverishing. It's enriching our instability. 377 00:43:52,180 --> 00:43:56,970 The fact that we can never be completely at home, that we have to search. 378 00:43:56,970 --> 00:44:04,220 Doesn't completely alienate us from the world, but should throw us into the world to seek its truth. 379 00:44:04,220 --> 00:44:11,220 Hello, Petrushka distinguishes here between having and seeking the truth, and he says that the thing itself, 380 00:44:11,220 --> 00:44:16,500 the thing that matters, the thing for which we bear responsibility is the seeking. 381 00:44:16,500 --> 00:44:25,040 In some ways, the seeking the search is the thing itself. And Christmas in December 1976, 382 00:44:25,040 --> 00:44:35,060 plateaued had his last kind of underground apartment seminar about high diggers being in time kind of throughout a 383 00:44:35,060 --> 00:44:41,130 large part of the seventies after he was thrown out of the university in the wake of the events of sixty eight, 384 00:44:41,130 --> 00:44:46,220 Petoskey and his students read Heidegger as being in time in PyTorch guest apartment. 385 00:44:46,220 --> 00:44:52,610 They read it out loud in German. They translate outloud into check, they read it again and again and again. 386 00:44:52,610 --> 00:44:56,420 It's like Koch's famous seminar on phenomenology of spirit in Paris. 387 00:44:56,420 --> 00:45:03,470 Keep reading phenomenology of spirit they kept reading big in time on January 1st, 1977, 388 00:45:03,470 --> 00:45:10,370 picture emerges as one of the initial three spokespeople for the Human Rights Petition Charter 77. 389 00:45:10,370 --> 00:45:15,980 Very soon after that, the secret police come for him, as he had known they would. 390 00:45:15,980 --> 00:45:21,380 He's an older man. He's in weak health. He does not survive the interrogations he dies. 391 00:45:21,380 --> 00:45:29,600 In March 1977, the following year, Mikulski's book on Heidegger is published in Poland. 392 00:45:29,600 --> 00:45:40,850 Beginning with their shared conviction of the special meaning of Heidegger for Eastern Europe living in Poland, Maski wrote in the introduction, 393 00:45:40,850 --> 00:45:50,510 he felt as if Heidegger were speaking directly to him like the eyes and certain portraits which seem to be gazing at you wherever you may be. 394 00:45:50,510 --> 00:46:00,530 Heidegger was for me and the husky, wrote the philosopher, who was able to disclose the weight of each step of my life for yours. 395 00:46:00,530 --> 00:46:11,750 That same year, 1978, Vaclav Havel published or didn't publish, I would say, he wrote on the encouragement of Auto Mechanic, 396 00:46:11,750 --> 00:46:21,780 an essay called The Power of the Powerless, which was also published in Samizdat in Polish, dedicated to John PyTorch because memory. 397 00:46:21,780 --> 00:46:29,880 And in that essay, you have your ordinary greengrocer, Communist Czechoslovakia, late 1970s, 398 00:46:29,880 --> 00:46:38,700 who every day goes to his vegetable shop and in the window alongside the carrots and the onions, he puts the sign saying workers of the world unite. 399 00:46:38,700 --> 00:46:47,880 And Hubble says why does he put the sign there? Is it his sincere, spontaneous desire to acquaint passers by with his socialist enthusiasm? 400 00:46:47,880 --> 00:46:51,720 No, Hubble says. Of course not. He doesn't believe the sign the passers by. 401 00:46:51,720 --> 00:46:55,650 Don't believe the sign. Even the regime no longer believes the sign. 402 00:46:55,650 --> 00:46:56,550 Moreover, 403 00:46:56,550 --> 00:47:02,820 the regime knows that the people don't believe and the people know that the regime knows that they know and everybody knows that everybody knows. 404 00:47:02,820 --> 00:47:05,100 But everybody keeps going on pretending. 405 00:47:05,100 --> 00:47:10,350 And Hovel says, Well, what else can the greengrocer do in the greengrocers powerless if he takes down the sign? 406 00:47:10,350 --> 00:47:16,740 If he stashes it at the bottom of the box of tomatoes, you know somebody could inform on him, you know, 407 00:47:16,740 --> 00:47:21,750 he could be questioned, he could be detained, his children could be denied access to education. 408 00:47:21,750 --> 00:47:30,950 So what can he do? And Hovell says, well, the fact that all of these bad things might happen to the green grocer if he takes down his sign suggests 409 00:47:30,950 --> 00:47:37,100 that the painting of the sign in which nobody believes anyway is actually paradoxically very important. 410 00:47:37,100 --> 00:47:42,860 In fact, if one day all the green grocers were to take down their signs, that would be the beginning of a revolution. 411 00:47:42,860 --> 00:47:47,120 Therefore, the green grocer is not so powerless, after all, because he is powerful. 412 00:47:47,120 --> 00:47:54,170 He is therefore responsible and also guilty for the green grocers who allow the game to go on in the first place. 413 00:47:54,170 --> 00:48:04,680 And Humble makes two philosophical points here. One at the ontological reality of truth is proven by contrast with the ontological reality of life. 414 00:48:04,680 --> 00:48:08,060 You know, the fact that you know that something is a lie, 415 00:48:08,060 --> 00:48:13,610 that there's a whole realm of life that is living a lie makes you know that there is something called truth. 416 00:48:13,610 --> 00:48:22,880 By contrast, the other point he's making is that the greengrocers failure to live in truth is a moral failure. 417 00:48:22,880 --> 00:48:29,390 The green grocer is guilty of what Thatcher would call love. Love is the bad faith, meaning self-deception. 418 00:48:29,390 --> 00:48:33,740 The self-deception is not about his faith in communism. The greengrocer knows perfectly well. 419 00:48:33,740 --> 00:48:37,820 He doesn't believe in communism. The bad faith is about his powerlessness. 420 00:48:37,820 --> 00:48:45,320 The greengrocer is deceiving himself into telling himself that he's powerless when in fact he is responsible, 421 00:48:45,320 --> 00:48:50,150 thereby allowing the oppression to go on in the first place. 422 00:48:50,150 --> 00:49:01,180 And I'm going to finish up this discussion by going back to guy who around the same time in the 1970s delivers a series of a few years earlier, 423 00:49:01,180 --> 00:49:10,210 maybe seventy three seventy four. You remember the year delivers a series of lectures on who's the role at Yale University. 424 00:49:10,210 --> 00:49:11,440 I love these lectures. 425 00:49:11,440 --> 00:49:20,890 In some ways it's the clearest exposition of whose role I think we have of, and he addresses very directly who are dancing it to wedding problems. 426 00:49:20,890 --> 00:49:32,800 And he says that whose role he admires, whose role he says that whose role wanted more passionately and dug deeper and tried harder to 427 00:49:32,800 --> 00:49:38,980 get to absolute truth and epistemological certainty than anybody else in modern philosophy. 428 00:49:38,980 --> 00:49:44,320 He dug deeper. He tried harder. He threw his whole being into it. 429 00:49:44,320 --> 00:49:51,790 Nevertheless, he said, who through all fails. He fails because the problem of the bridge is insoluble. 430 00:49:51,790 --> 00:49:58,720 There is no bridge between consciousness and being there's no there's no way to get from inner to outer, from imminence to transcendence. 431 00:49:58,720 --> 00:50:05,860 If you start with eminence, you'll end with imminence. Without God, it can't be done. 432 00:50:05,860 --> 00:50:10,510 If we start with the imminent world, Kerlikowske says, we'll end with the imminent world. 433 00:50:10,510 --> 00:50:15,400 The problem of the bridge is insoluble. There's no logical passage. Nevertheless, 434 00:50:15,400 --> 00:50:19,420 and here is the point that I think is particularly important to understand about 435 00:50:19,420 --> 00:50:23,440 dissident philosophy in Eastern Europe that might be worth remembering today. 436 00:50:23,440 --> 00:50:28,510 Nevertheless, Kerlikowske says the moral imperative even though the problem with the bridge is insoluble. 437 00:50:28,510 --> 00:50:34,610 If you bracket, you bracket the fact that that bridge can never be found and you keep looking. 438 00:50:34,610 --> 00:50:41,390 Because if you give up on truth, you've given up on ethics because epistemological questions are always already ethical questions. 439 00:50:41,390 --> 00:50:48,980 And it is morally impermissible to give up on truth. And the move is very, very close to what Patrick is talking about in that third heretical essay. 440 00:50:48,980 --> 00:50:58,890 The seeking is the thing itself. It's active. And that activity is the activity of somebody who is responsible. 441 00:50:58,890 --> 00:51:03,480 And so we kind of move through this arc, and I'll just say a couple of words in conclusion. 442 00:51:03,480 --> 00:51:06,330 I know you've been sitting for a long time and it's Friday night. 443 00:51:06,330 --> 00:51:14,190 We move through this arc of truth, this subject object conscious and being correspondence to a conversation about truth. 444 00:51:14,190 --> 00:51:22,830 That's about the relationship between consciousness and being, but also about truth and lies and authenticity and authenticity. 445 00:51:22,830 --> 00:51:27,960 It's an interrogation of what it means to be in the world. 446 00:51:27,960 --> 00:51:35,400 That becomes very primordial historical. What comes in the middle is history. 447 00:51:35,400 --> 00:51:43,590 And I want to just say a couple of words in conclusion, perhaps about why this phenomenological essentials tradition takes a very 448 00:51:43,590 --> 00:51:48,150 different path in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia than it does in France, 449 00:51:48,150 --> 00:51:55,230 because coming out of the same continental tradition in France and in some ways responding to totalitarianism. 450 00:51:55,230 --> 00:52:03,720 You have a postmodernism that says there can never be any such thing as a stable truth, as a stable meaning as a stable subject. 451 00:52:03,720 --> 00:52:04,170 In fact, 452 00:52:04,170 --> 00:52:14,970 the mere positing of those things is a risk of a future totalitarianism that in fact the imperative to insist that truth is always self undermining, 453 00:52:14,970 --> 00:52:25,470 always fragile and contingent is what will stave off the absolutist claims that have landed us in totalitarianism in the 20th century. 454 00:52:25,470 --> 00:52:32,910 Derrida had this idea of the Appau you you know the moment of the Enpass where no meaning is possible, 455 00:52:32,910 --> 00:52:37,950 where you have to give up on the ontological reality of truth because that is your defence, 456 00:52:37,950 --> 00:52:48,060 your critical sensibility to to articulate yourself and to resist totalitarianism, to resist the absolutist claims of grand narratives. 457 00:52:48,060 --> 00:52:56,190 And what happened in East Central Europe is a kind of different philosophical move that also rejects grand narratives, 458 00:52:56,190 --> 00:53:04,770 but says that even after you have extricated yourself from Marxism as the last grand narrative and refused to go to any others, 459 00:53:04,770 --> 00:53:08,670 you still can't give up on truth. 460 00:53:08,670 --> 00:53:19,830 The fact that the fact that truth involves subjectivity, that subjectivity can never be purged does not relative vice truth, 461 00:53:19,830 --> 00:53:28,240 but grounds it that a return to the subject is the thing that should ground truth as opposed to make it melt into air. 462 00:53:28,240 --> 00:53:31,410 And this is a very who cirelli it in a way you return to the subject, 463 00:53:31,410 --> 00:53:38,190 but that's with an idea that that's going to allow you to get to absolute truth and epistemological clarity, 464 00:53:38,190 --> 00:53:45,300 as opposed to an idea that going back into the subject relative size is everything until all that is solid melts into air. 465 00:53:45,300 --> 00:53:51,120 The imperative is you need to posit and onto logically real subject and onto logically real truth. 466 00:53:51,120 --> 00:53:56,280 And the idea is that truth and subject are linked to the responsibility. Truth is active. 467 00:53:56,280 --> 00:53:59,610 The moral imperative is to keep seeking, to keep searching. 468 00:53:59,610 --> 00:54:06,150 The fact that it's not some refined object out there to be caught and tossed around doesn't make it less real, 469 00:54:06,150 --> 00:54:11,790 and the seeking becomes the thing itself, but it is morally impermissible to give up. 470 00:54:11,790 --> 00:54:19,560 And that epistemological question and that epistemological faith has to be understood as a moral question. 471 00:54:19,560 --> 00:54:31,400 OK, I'm going to end now and by. Trying to invoke a little bit of both electrical cloak hospitalising, just like me, is the life. 472 00:54:31,400 --> 00:54:43,950 I'm going to end with a passage from an interview that Christopher Michalski gave to tickle me right after his death in 2009. 473 00:54:43,950 --> 00:54:55,800 And I I fear my English translation will not completely capture the beauty of just a sense of humour and polish, but I've tried my best here. 474 00:54:55,800 --> 00:55:01,260 So this is just off telling, just off my housekeeper telling a story about life at Coco Ski. 475 00:55:01,260 --> 00:55:08,010 And he says for many years, the Institute for Some Chopped and Fun mentioned, which I oversee in Vienna, 476 00:55:08,010 --> 00:55:17,280 organise meetings of the outstanding scholars comprising its academic council at the Papal Summer Residence in Castello Gandolfo. 477 00:55:17,280 --> 00:55:26,880 Once in the 1980s, when we were returning to the hotel following one of the meetings, discussions dominated by Paul Record, Emmanuel Levinas Lesniak, 478 00:55:26,880 --> 00:55:29,580 a member of our council from the very beginning, 479 00:55:29,580 --> 00:55:38,070 proposed that the name of the institute be changed to the Institute for the Science of Living Nazism, Derrida ism. 480 00:55:38,070 --> 00:55:44,070 And he fell into a discussion when Christof pulled me on about the future programme of such a reformed institute, 481 00:55:44,070 --> 00:55:47,910 a programme that foresaw the creation of a department of dialectical living, 482 00:55:47,910 --> 00:55:58,710 Nazism, Derrida, ISM, Department of Historical, Levinas ISM, Derrida ISM, etc. to the amazement of the very serious German professors accompanying us, 483 00:55:58,710 --> 00:56:03,700 the discussion concluded in Russia after returning to the hotel, 484 00:56:03,700 --> 00:56:10,350 Colaco Ski wrote in Mediaeval Latin, a proposed papal bull, which, amongst other things, 485 00:56:10,350 --> 00:56:21,510 declared that quote the claim that not all French philosophers should be burned unquote was heretical, poorly formulated and should be condemned. 486 00:56:21,510 --> 00:56:28,890 Later, we gave that bull to the pope for authorisation, but I won't say whether he signed or not. 487 00:56:28,890 --> 00:56:39,392 Thank you.